Local inventor uses light to simplify communication

A Wichita inventor has created a way to take light and using it to simplify communication around the world.

John Harrison said the idea to create Filimin started with his own family and its lack of deep communication.

"A little more than a year ago. I was thinking what I wanted to get my family and my family is spread out. My sister is in Canada, my brother is in Indiana, my mom's in Boston, my half brother's in Massachusetts, we're spread out. We're not the best at staying in touch and I thought what's a way that could bring us all together and just remind us that we're family," Harrison said. "So I built these with some help of my wife in our basement and that was it. I was planning to be done at that point."

But that's not exactly what happened. Harrison said he started showing Filimin around to some people at MakeICT events, StartUp events and so forth. He said people became really interested in them and started asking if he could make some for other families.

The way they work is one person can touch his or her own Filimin and it will change to a different color. The others across the country or even across the world will then change to the same color. He said it's a way of showing someone you're thinking of them without texting or calling. He said it's more organic.

"You can't say anything with it, there are no words. There is nothing verbal about it unlike your phone where you get texts that are verbal or Facebook. It's social networking but it's social networking that's simplified to such a point that all it is is a color. So I like to think that it reaches a more primal, more natural place inside us," he said.

Harrison said so far, he's sold more than $50,000 worth of his product and he's not done yet. But it's not the money he said is most important. He's most proud of the impact he can make on lives, but also the fact that he's keeping it all local.

The Women's Initiative Network is working with Harrison to create Filimin. He said working with the local non-profit and with local women has kept his idea for the product intact.

"From the beginning, this wasn't a venture of how rich can I be. It was a venture of how can I offer something beautiful to the world. And I thought it would be a little bit hypocritical to offer a product that I thought added beauty to the world but the way it was manufactured it didn't necessarily add beauty to the world," Harrison said. "So it was important to me to try to find a local non-profit that I felt I could build a relationship with that would be empowering people in some way."

He said at the end of the day, people could use a simpler form of communication that's less instant and less in your face.

"There's pretty strong scientific evidence that something as simple as a light has incredible power, has incredible emotional power. And that's one of those things that's fairly obvious and we all see that and notice that," Harrison said."